Words matter — all 11,400,000 or so of them.
That’s how many words the 24 fourth grade students in Laura Kornacki’s classroom have read this year — at least so far. With almost four weeks of school left, Kornacki expects that number to increase.
In September, Kornacki challenged her students to read 10 million words this school year through the Accelerated Reader program, where they read a book and then take a comprehension test. The computer automatically records how many words they have read. If they met the challenge, they would have the opportunity to slime her. With the goal not only met but exceeded, the payoff came last Friday.
Kornacki slipped out of her classroom under the pretext of attending a meeting and instead mixed up two buckets of dark blue slime.
“I’m regretting my September decision,” she laughingly said as she mixed up the slime. “Ten million seemed like a high goal.”
Her students took her up on the challenge, with three of them reading at least one million words apiece. One student reached that goal on Friday before the sliming began.
Kornacki said she got the idea from librarian Allegra Robertson, who lets students who have read one million words during the school year slime her in May. But Kornacki wanted to set a goal just for her class.
“I wanted to have a class goal, something for them all to work towards, to encourage each other to be readers,” she said. “We are doing something fun. For me, I really believe that reading and math are those things you don’t get better at if you don’t practice. And a lot of times, reading becomes something that kids dread.”
The students knew they were close to the goal because each one kept a count of their own words, but those who knew the collective total was a close group of just a few people. And they weren’t divulging the total. Media specialist Erika Rooney said it was an especially hard secret to keep because her daughter is a student in Kornacki’s class.
Kornacki was surprised to see how close they were to the goal before Spring Break. That’s when she knew she was eventually going to have to make good on her challenge, but she decided to keep the event a secret from her students.
So last Friday afternoon she left class under the pretext of attending a meeting, mixed up her two buckets of slime, carried them to the playground, set up a chair and prepared herself to be slimed.
Students were told they had earned an extra recess since they had done such a good job during state mandatory testing. When the classroom door burst open to let the students onto the playground, there sat their teacher holding a sign reading “You did it. 10 million words read. Slime me.”
Students eagerly formed a line to do just that.
Dean Brown, 9, who read 1,038,946 words, was the first to pour a pitcher of slime over his teacher’s head. Brown said he likes to read Warriors books, which are 200-400 pages long.
Aminah Eldridge, 10, said she had read 10 books, totaling 114,106 words. She likes to read comic books and dragon books. Most of the books she read were 100-200 pages long, she said.
“I thought it was really cool,” she said of getting to slime her teacher. “They told us she was in a meeting and we were getting an extra recess. I didn’t know until we came out here we were going to slime her. I figured it out when I came out here and saw the sign. I was very excited.”
If Kornacki’s intent was to encourage students to read, she was successful.
“I wanted to reach 10 million because I wanted to slime her,” said Tannith Rooney, 10, who said she has read more than 2 million words so far in the 62 books she has read and tested over.
Kornacki had more than just a reading program in mind; she also thought it was important to teach her students about setting goals.
“I really hope they just take away a life lesson in that you can set a really ambitious goal, and as long as you try and you are working towards it, slow and steady, that you can do it,” she said.
Kornacki has some goals of her own to set. She is trying to figure out the reading goal for her class for the rest of this school year.
“So we’re going to have to figure out that goal to keep them reading until the end of the year, maybe something for 13 or 14 million. Not slime again, but something else,” she said as she wiped some of the blue gunk off herself.